1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the scheduling of meetings. More particularly, the invention relates to a time request queue for scheduling a meeting with a hard-to-schedule person.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There are people in every organization with whom it is very difficult to schedule time. Typically, these people have administrative assistants that manage their time. Though group-scheduling software exists today, booking a meeting with these hard-to-schedule people typically requires contacting the administrative assistant by some alternate mechanism, such as telephone or email, and then requesting the meeting to be scheduled. This is not a big problem in isolation. But as many such meeting requests pile up, considerable time is spent by the administrative assistant in managing the requests and allotting time for each request. Should the scheduled time need to change, as it often does, a lot of time is spent trying to communicate the change of plans to those affected.
Currently, in group scheduling software a meeting organizer fills out a meeting request by proposing a date and time for the event to a list of attendees who, in turn, accept or decline the request. In all commercial group scheduling software today, the organizer is the only person who can set any detail of the meeting, i.e. the start time, the duration, the meeting title, the descriptive text, etc.
It would be advantageous to provide a group scheduling solution that offers an organized and formalized solution to the above described time management problem, in which the desired meeting includes one person who is difficult to schedule.